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2017-11-14block, bfq: move debug blkio stats behind CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUPLuca Miccio
BFQ currently creates, and updates, its own instance of the whole set of blkio statistics that cfq creates. Yet, from the comments of Tejun Heo in [1], it turned out that most of these statistics are meant/useful only for debugging. This commit makes BFQ create the latter, debugging statistics only if the option CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is set. By doing so, this commit also enables BFQ to enjoy a high perfomance boost. The reason is that, if CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is not set, then BFQ has to update far fewer statistics, and, in particular, not the heaviest to update. To give an idea of the benefits, if CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is not set, then, on an Intel i7-4850HQ, and with 8 threads doing random I/O in parallel on null_blk (configured with 0 latency), the throughput of BFQ grows from 310 to 400 KIOPS (+30%). We have measured similar or even much higher boosts with other CPUs: e.g., +45% with an ARM CortexTM-A53 Octa-core. Our results have been obtained and can be reproduced very easily with the script in [1]. [1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-block/msg18943.html Suggested-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Suggested-by: Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@linaro.org> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-11-14block, bfq: update blkio stats outside the scheduler lockPaolo Valente
bfq invokes various blkg_*stats_* functions to update the statistics contained in the special files blkio.bfq.* in the blkio controller groups, i.e., the I/O accounting related to the proportional-share policy provided by bfq. The execution of these functions takes a considerable percentage, about 40%, of the total per-request execution time of bfq (i.e., of the sum of the execution time of all the bfq functions that have to be executed to process an I/O request from its creation to its destruction). This reduces the request-processing rate sustainable by bfq noticeably, even on a multicore CPU. In fact, the bfq functions that invoke blkg_*stats_* functions cannot be executed in parallel with the rest of the code of bfq, because both are executed under the same same per-device scheduler lock. To reduce this slowdown, this commit moves, wherever possible, the invocation of these functions (more precisely, of the bfq functions that invoke blkg_*stats_* functions) outside the critical sections protected by the scheduler lock. With this change, and with all blkio.bfq.* statistics enabled, the throughput grows, e.g., from 250 to 310 KIOPS (+25%) on an Intel i7-4850HQ, in case of 8 threads doing random I/O in parallel on null_blk, with the latter configured with 0 latency. We obtained the same or higher throughput boosts, up to +30%, with other processors (some figures are reported in the documentation). For our tests, we used the script [1], with which our results can be easily reproduced. NOTE. This commit still protects the invocation of blkg_*stats_* functions with the request_queue lock, because the group these functions are invoked on may otherwise disappear before or while these functions are executed. Fortunately, tests without even this lock show, by difference, that the serialization caused by this lock has a little impact (at most ~5% of throughput reduction). [1] https://github.com/Algodev-github/IOSpeed Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-11-14block, bfq: add missing invocations of bfqg_stats_update_io_add/removeLuca Miccio
bfqg_stats_update_io_add and bfqg_stats_update_io_remove are to be invoked, respectively, when an I/O request enters and when an I/O request exits the scheduler. Unfortunately, bfq does not fully comply with this scheme, because it does not invoke these functions for requests that are inserted into or extracted from its priority dispatch list. This commit fixes this mistake. Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-09block, bfq: fix unbalanced decrements of burst sizePaolo Valente
The commit "block, bfq: decrease burst size when queues in burst exit" introduced the decrement of burst_size on the removal of a bfq_queue from the burst list. Unfortunately, this decrement can happen to be performed even when burst size is already equal to 0, because of unbalanced decrements. A description follows of the cause of these unbalanced decrements, namely a wrong assumption, and of the way how this wrong assumption leads to unbalanced decrements. The wrong assumption is that a bfq_queue can exit only if the process associated with the bfq_queue has exited. This is false, because a bfq_queue, say Q, may exit also as a consequence of a merge with another bfq_queue. In this case, Q exits because the I/O of its associated process has been redirected to another bfq_queue. The decrement unbalance occurs because Q may then be re-created after a split, and added back to the current burst list, *without* incrementing burst_size. burst_size is not incremented because Q is not a new bfq_queue added to the burst list, but a bfq_queue only temporarily removed from the list, and, before the commit "bfq-sq, bfq-mq: decrease burst size when queues in burst exit", burst_size was not decremented when Q was removed. This commit addresses this issue by just checking whether the exiting bfq_queue is a merged bfq_queue, and, in that case, not decrementing burst_size. Unfortunately, this still leaves room for unbalanced decrements, in the following rarer case: on a split, the bfq_queue happens to be inserted into a different burst list than that it was removed from when merged. If this happens, the number of elements in the new burst list becomes higher than burst_size (by one). When the bfq_queue then exits, it is of course not in a merged state any longer, thus burst_size is decremented, which results in an unbalanced decrement. To handle this sporadic, unlucky case in a simple way, this commit also checks that burst_size is larger than 0 before decrementing it. Finally, this commit removes an useless, extra check: the check that the bfq_queue is sync, performed before checking whether the bfq_queue is in the burst list. This extra check is redundant, because only sync bfq_queues can be inserted into the burst list. Fixes: 7cb04004fa37 ("block, bfq: decrease burst size when queues in burst exit") Reported-by: Philip Müller <philm@manjaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Tested-by: Philip Müller <philm@manjaro.org> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-09block,bfq: Disable writeback throttlingLuca Miccio
Similarly to CFQ, BFQ has its write-throttling heuristics, and it is better not to combine them with further write-throttling heuristics of a different nature. So this commit disables write-back throttling for a device if BFQ is used as I/O scheduler for that device. Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03block, bfq: decrease burst size when queues in burst exitPaolo Valente
If many queues belonging to the same group happen to be created shortly after each other, then the concurrent processes associated with these queues have typically a common goal, and they get it done as soon as possible if not hampered by device idling. Examples are processes spawned by git grep, or by systemd during boot. As for device idling, this mechanism is currently necessary for weight raising to succeed in its goal: privileging I/O. In view of these facts, BFQ does not provide the above queues with either weight raising or device idling. On the other hand, a burst of queue creations may be caused also by the start-up of a complex application. In this case, these queues need usually to be served one after the other, and as quickly as possible, to maximise responsiveness. Therefore, in this case the best strategy is to weight-raise all the queues created during the burst, i.e., the exact opposite of the strategy for the above case. To distinguish between the two cases, BFQ uses an empirical burst-size threshold, found through extensive tests and monitoring of daily usage. Only large bursts, i.e., burst with a size above this threshold, are considered as generated by a high number of parallel processes. In this respect, upstart-based boot proved to be rather hard to detect as generating a large burst of queue creations, because with upstart most of the queues created in a burst exit *before* the next queues in the same burst are created. To address this issue, I changed the burst-detection mechanism so as to not decrease the size of the current burst even if one of the queues in the burst is eliminated. Unfortunately, this missing decrease causes false positives on very fast systems: on the start-up of a complex application, such as libreoffice writer, so many queues are created, served and exited shortly after each other, that a large burst of queue creations is wrongly detected as occurring. These false positives just disappear if the size of a burst is decreased when one of the queues in the burst exits. This commit restores the missing burst-size decrease, relying of the fact that upstart is apparently unlikely to be used on systems running this and future versions of the kernel. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Mauro Andreolini <mauro.andreolini@unimore.it> Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <mirkomontanari91@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03block, bfq: let early-merged queues be weight-raised on split tooPaolo Valente
A just-created bfq_queue, say Q, may happen to be merged with another bfq_queue on the very first invocation of the function __bfq_insert_request. In such a case, even if Q would clearly deserve interactive weight raising (as it has just been created), the function bfq_add_request does not make it to be invoked for Q, and thus to activate weight raising for Q. As a consequence, when the state of Q is saved for a possible future restore, after a split of Q from the other bfq_queue(s), such a state happens to be (unjustly) non-weight-raised. Then the bfq_queue will not enjoy any weight raising on the split, even if should still be in an interactive weight-raising period when the split occurs. This commit solves this problem as follows, for a just-created bfq_queue that is being early-merged: it stores directly, in the saved state of the bfq_queue, the weight-raising state that would have been assigned to the bfq_queue if not early-merged. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <mirkomontanari91@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03block, bfq: check and switch back to interactive wr also on queue splitPaolo Valente
As already explained in the message of commit "block, bfq: fix wrong init of saved start time for weight raising", if a soft real-time weight-raising period happens to be nested in a larger interactive weight-raising period, then BFQ restores the interactive weight raising at the end of the soft real-time weight raising. In particular, BFQ checks whether the latter has ended only on request dispatches. Unfortunately, the above scheme fails to restore interactive weight raising in the following corner case: if a bfq_queue, say Q, 1) Is merged with another bfq_queue while it is in a nested soft real-time weight-raising period. The weight-raising state of Q is then saved, and not considered any longer until a split occurs. 2) Is split from the other bfq_queue(s) at a time instant when its soft real-time weight raising is already finished. On the split, while resuming the previous, soft real-time weight-raised state of the bfq_queue Q, BFQ checks whether the current soft real-time weight-raising period is actually over. If so, BFQ switches weight raising off for Q, *without* checking whether the soft real-time period was actually nested in a non-yet-finished interactive weight-raising period. This commit addresses this issue by adding the above missing check in bfq_queue splits, and restoring interactive weight raising if needed. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <mirkomontanari91@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03block, bfq: fix wrong init of saved start time for weight raisingPaolo Valente
This commit fixes a bug that causes bfq to fail to guarantee a high responsiveness on some drives, if there is heavy random read+write I/O in the background. More precisely, such a failure allowed this bug to be found [1], but the bug may well cause other yet unreported anomalies. BFQ raises the weight of the bfq_queues associated with soft real-time applications, to privilege the I/O, and thus reduce latency, for these applications. This mechanism is named soft-real-time weight raising in BFQ. A soft real-time period may happen to be nested into an interactive weight raising period, i.e., it may happen that, when a bfq_queue switches to a soft real-time weight-raised state, the bfq_queue is already being weight-raised because deemed interactive too. In this case, BFQ saves in a special variable wr_start_at_switch_to_srt, the time instant when the interactive weight-raising period started for the bfq_queue, i.e., the time instant when BFQ started to deem the bfq_queue interactive. This value is then used to check whether the interactive weight-raising period would still be in progress when the soft real-time weight-raising period ends. If so, interactive weight raising is restored for the bfq_queue. This restore is useful, in particular, because it prevents bfq_queues from losing their interactive weight raising prematurely, as a consequence of spurious, short-lived soft real-time weight-raising periods caused by wrong detections as soft real-time. If, instead, a bfq_queue switches to soft-real-time weight raising while it *is not* already in an interactive weight-raising period, then the variable wr_start_at_switch_to_srt has no meaning during the following soft real-time weight-raising period. Unfortunately the handling of this case is wrong in BFQ: not only the variable is not flagged somehow as meaningless, but it is also set to the time when the switch to soft real-time weight-raising occurs. This may cause an interactive weight-raising period to be considered mistakenly as still in progress, and thus a spurious interactive weight-raising period to start for the bfq_queue, at the end of the soft-real-time weight-raising period. In particular the spurious interactive weight-raising period will be considered as still in progress, if the soft-real-time weight-raising period does not last very long. The bfq_queue will then be wrongly privileged and, if I/O bound, will unjustly steal bandwidth to truly interactive or soft real-time bfq_queues, harming responsiveness and low latency. This commit fixes this issue by just setting wr_start_at_switch_to_srt to minus infinity (farthest past time instant according to jiffies macros): when the soft-real-time weight-raising period ends, certainly no interactive weight-raising period will be considered as still in progress. [1] Background I/O Type: Random - Background I/O mix: Reads and writes - Application to start: LibreOffice Writer in http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.13-IO-Laptop Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <mirkomontanari91@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-09-09Merge branch 'for-4.14/block-postmerge' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-blockLinus Torvalds
Pull followup block layer updates from Jens Axboe: "I ended up splitting the main pull request for this series into two, mainly because of clashes between NVMe fixes that went into 4.13 after the for-4.14 branches were split off. This pull request is mostly NVMe, but not exclusively. In detail, it contains: - Two pull request for NVMe changes from Christoph. Nothing new on the feature front, basically just fixes all over the map for the core bits, transport, rdma, etc. - Series from Bart, cleaning up various bits in the BFQ scheduler. - Series of bcache fixes, which has been lingering for a release or two. Coly sent this in, but patches from various people in this area. - Set of patches for BFQ from Paolo himself, updating both documentation and fixing some corner cases in performance. - Series from Omar, attempting to now get the 4k loop support correct. Our confidence level is higher this time. - Series from Shaohua for loop as well, improving O_DIRECT performance and fixing a use-after-free" * 'for-4.14/block-postmerge' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block: (74 commits) bcache: initialize dirty stripes in flash_dev_run() loop: set physical block size to logical block size bcache: fix bch_hprint crash and improve output bcache: Update continue_at() documentation bcache: silence static checker warning bcache: fix for gc and write-back race bcache: increase the number of open buckets bcache: Correct return value for sysfs attach errors bcache: correct cache_dirty_target in __update_writeback_rate() bcache: gc does not work when triggering by manual command bcache: Don't reinvent the wheel but use existing llist API bcache: do not subtract sectors_to_gc for bypassed IO bcache: fix sequential large write IO bypass bcache: Fix leak of bdev reference block/loop: remove unused field block/loop: fix use after free bfq: Use icq_to_bic() consistently bfq: Suppress compiler warnings about comparisons bfq: Check kstrtoul() return value bfq: Declare local functions static ...
2017-09-01bfq: Use icq_to_bic() consistentlyBart Van Assche
Some code uses icq_to_bic() to convert an io_cq pointer to a bfq_io_cq pointer while other code uses a direct cast. Convert the code that uses a direct cast such that it uses icq_to_bic(). Acked-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@wdc.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-09-01bfq: Suppress compiler warnings about comparisonsBart Van Assche
This patch avoids that the following warnings are reported when building with W=1: block/bfq-iosched.c: In function 'bfq_back_seek_max_store': block/bfq-iosched.c:4860:13: warning: comparison of unsigned expression < 0 is always false [-Wtype-limits] if (__data < (MIN)) \ ^ block/bfq-iosched.c:4876:1: note: in expansion of macro 'STORE_FUNCTION' STORE_FUNCTION(bfq_back_seek_max_store, &bfqd->bfq_back_max, 0, INT_MAX, 0); ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~ block/bfq-iosched.c: In function 'bfq_slice_idle_store': block/bfq-iosched.c:4860:13: warning: comparison of unsigned expression < 0 is always false [-Wtype-limits] if (__data < (MIN)) \ ^ block/bfq-iosched.c:4879:1: note: in expansion of macro 'STORE_FUNCTION' STORE_FUNCTION(bfq_slice_idle_store, &bfqd->bfq_slice_idle, 0, INT_MAX, 2); ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~ block/bfq-iosched.c: In function 'bfq_slice_idle_us_store': block/bfq-iosched.c:4892:13: warning: comparison of unsigned expression < 0 is always false [-Wtype-limits] if (__data < (MIN)) \ ^ block/bfq-iosched.c:4899:1: note: in expansion of macro 'USEC_STORE_FUNCTION' USEC_STORE_FUNCTION(bfq_slice_idle_us_store, &bfqd->bfq_slice_idle, 0, ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Acked-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@wdc.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-09-01bfq: Check kstrtoul() return valueBart Van Assche
Make sysfs writes fail for invalid numbers instead of storing uninitialized data copied from the stack. This patch removes all uninitialized_var() occurrences from the BFQ source code. Acked-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@wdc.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-09-01bfq: Annotate fall-through in a switch statementBart Van Assche
This patch avoids that gcc 7 issues a warning about fall-through when building with W=1. Acked-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@wdc.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-31block, bfq: make lookup_next_entity push up vtime on expirationsPaolo Valente
To provide a very smooth service, bfq starts to serve a bfq_queue only if the queue is 'eligible', i.e., if the same queue would have started to be served in the ideal, perfectly fair system that bfq simulates internally. This is obtained by associating each queue with a virtual start time, and by computing a special system virtual time quantity: a queue is eligible only if the system virtual time has reached the virtual start time of the queue. Finally, bfq guarantees that, when a new queue must be set in service, there is always at least one eligible entity for each active parent entity in the scheduler. To provide this guarantee, the function __bfq_lookup_next_entity pushes up, for each parent entity on which it is invoked, the system virtual time to the minimum among the virtual start times of the entities in the active tree for the parent entity (more precisely, the push up occurs if the system virtual time happens to be lower than all such virtual start times). There is however a circumstance in which __bfq_lookup_next_entity cannot push up the system virtual time for a parent entity, even if the system virtual time is lower than the virtual start times of all the child entities in the active tree. It happens if one of the child entities is in service. In fact, in such a case, there is already an eligible entity, the in-service one, even if it may not be not present in the active tree (because in-service entities may be removed from the active tree). Unfortunately, in the last re-design of the hierarchical-scheduling engine, the reset of the pointer to the in-service entity for a given parent entity--reset to be done as a consequence of the expiration of the in-service entity--always happens after the function __bfq_lookup_next_entity has been invoked. This causes the function to think that there is still an entity in service for the parent entity, and then that the system virtual time cannot be pushed up, even if actually such a no-more-in-service entity has already been properly reinserted into the active tree (or in some other tree if no more active). Yet, the system virtual time *had* to be pushed up, to be ready to correctly choose the next queue to serve. Because of the lack of this push up, bfq may wrongly set in service a queue that had been speculatively pre-computed as the possible next-in-service queue, but that would no more be the one to serve after the expiration and the reinsertion into the active trees of the previously in-service entities. This commit addresses this issue by making __bfq_lookup_next_entity properly push up the system virtual time if an expiration is occurring. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-29bfq: Re-enable auto-loading when built as a moduleBen Hutchings
The block core requests modules with the "-iosched" name suffix, but bfq no longer has that suffix. Add an alias. Fixes: ea25da48086d ("block, bfq: split bfq-iosched.c into multiple ...") Reviewed-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-28block, scheduler: convert xxx_var_store to voidweiping zhang
The last parameter "count" never be used in xxx_var_store, convert these functions to void. Signed-off-by: weiping zhang <zhangweiping@didichuxing.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-23block, bfq: fix error handle in bfq_initweiping zhang
if elv_register fail, bfq_pool should be free. Signed-off-by: weiping zhang <zhangweiping@didichuxing.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-11block, bfq: boost throughput with flash-based non-queueing devicesPaolo Valente
When a queue associated with a process remains empty, there are cases where throughput gets boosted if the device is idled to await the arrival of a new I/O request for that queue. Currently, BFQ assumes that one of these cases is when the device has no internal queueing (regardless of the properties of the I/O being served). Unfortunately, this condition has proved to be too general. So, this commit refines it as "the device has no internal queueing and is rotational". This refinement provides a significant throughput boost with random I/O, on flash-based storage without internal queueing. For example, on a HiKey board, throughput increases by up to 125%, growing, e.g., from 6.9MB/s to 15.6MB/s with two or three random readers in parallel. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-08-11block,bfq: refactor device-idling logicPaolo Valente
The logic that decides whether to idle the device is scattered across three functions. Almost all of the logic is in the function bfq_bfqq_may_idle, but (1) part of the decision is made in bfq_update_idle_window, and (2) the function bfq_bfqq_must_idle may switch off idling regardless of the output of bfq_bfqq_may_idle. In addition, both bfq_update_idle_window and bfq_bfqq_must_idle make their decisions as a function of parameters that are used, for similar purposes, also in bfq_bfqq_may_idle. This commit addresses these issues by moving all the logic into bfq_bfqq_may_idle. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-07-12bfq: dispatch request to prevent queue stalling after the request completionHou Tao
There are mq devices (eg., virtio-blk, nbd and loopback) which don't invoke blk_mq_run_hw_queues() after the completion of a request. If bfq is enabled on these devices and the slice_idle attribute or strict_guarantees attribute is set as zero, it is possible that after a request completion the remaining requests of busy bfq queue will stalled in the bfq schedule until a new request arrives. To fix the scheduler latency problem, we need to check whether or not all issued requests have completed and dispatch more requests to driver if there is no request in driver. The problem can be reproduced by running the following script on a virtio-blk device with nr_hw_queues as 1: #!/bin/sh dev=vdb # mount point for dev mp=/tmp/mnt cd $mp job=strict.job cat <<EOF > $job [global] direct=1 bs=4k size=256M rw=write ioengine=libaio iodepth=128 runtime=5 time_based [1] filename=1.data [2] new_group filename=2.data EOF echo bfq > /sys/block/$dev/queue/scheduler echo 1 > /sys/block/$dev/queue/iosched/strict_guarantees fio $job Signed-off-by: Hou Tao <houtao1@huawei.com> Reviewed-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-07-03block, bfq: don't change ioprio class for a bfq_queue on a service treePaolo Valente
On each deactivation or re-scheduling (after being served) of a bfq_queue, BFQ invokes the function __bfq_entity_update_weight_prio(), to perform pending updates of ioprio, weight and ioprio class for the bfq_queue. BFQ also invokes this function on I/O-request dispatches, to raise or lower weights more quickly when needed, thereby improving latency. However, the entity representing the bfq_queue may be on the active (sub)tree of a service tree when this happens, and, although with a very low probability, the bfq_queue may happen to also have a pending change of its ioprio class. If both conditions hold when __bfq_entity_update_weight_prio() is invoked, then the entity moves to a sort of hybrid state: the new service tree for the entity, as returned by bfq_entity_service_tree(), differs from service tree on which the entity still is. The functions that handle activations and deactivations of entities do not cope with such a hybrid state (and would need to become more complex to cope). This commit addresses this issue by just making __bfq_entity_update_weight_prio() not perform also a possible pending change of ioprio class, when invoked on an I/O-request dispatch for a bfq_queue. Such a change is thus postponed to when __bfq_entity_update_weight_prio() is invoked on deactivation or re-scheduling of the bfq_queue. Reported-by: Marco Piazza <mpiazza@gmail.com> Reported-by: Laurentiu Nicola <lnicola@dend.ro> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Marco Piazza <mpiazza@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-06-27block, bfq: update wr_busy_queues if needed on a queue splitPaolo Valente
This commit fixes a bug triggered by a non-trivial sequence of events. These events are briefly described in the next two paragraphs. The impatiens, or those who are familiar with queue merging and splitting, can jump directly to the last paragraph. On each I/O-request arrival for a shared bfq_queue, i.e., for a bfq_queue that is the result of the merge of two or more bfq_queues, BFQ checks whether the shared bfq_queue has become seeky (i.e., if too many random I/O requests have arrived for the bfq_queue; if the device is non rotational, then random requests must be also small for the bfq_queue to be tagged as seeky). If the shared bfq_queue is actually detected as seeky, then a split occurs: the bfq I/O context of the process that has issued the request is redirected from the shared bfq_queue to a new non-shared bfq_queue. As a degenerate case, if the shared bfq_queue actually happens to be shared only by one process (because of previous splits), then no new bfq_queue is created: the state of the shared bfq_queue is just changed from shared to non shared. Regardless of whether a brand new non-shared bfq_queue is created, or the pre-existing shared bfq_queue is just turned into a non-shared bfq_queue, several parameters of the non-shared bfq_queue are set (restored) to the original values they had when the bfq_queue associated with the bfq I/O context of the process (that has just issued an I/O request) was merged with the shared bfq_queue. One of these parameters is the weight-raising state. If, on the split of a shared bfq_queue, 1) a pre-existing shared bfq_queue is turned into a non-shared bfq_queue; 2) the previously shared bfq_queue happens to be busy; 3) the weight-raising state of the previously shared bfq_queue happens to change; the number of weight-raised busy queues changes. The field wr_busy_queues must then be updated accordingly, but such an update was missing. This commit adds the missing update. Reported-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-06-18blk-mq-sched: unify request prepare methodsChristoph Hellwig
This patch makes sure we always allocate requests in the core blk-mq code and use a common prepare_request method to initialize them for both mq I/O schedulers. For Kyber and additional limit_depth method is added that is called before allocating the request. Also because none of the intializations can really fail the new method does not return an error - instead the bfq finish method is hardened to deal with the no-IOC case. Last but not least this removes the abuse of RQF_QUEUE by the blk-mq scheduling code as RQF_ELFPRIV is all that is needed now. Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-06-18bfq-iosched: fix NULL ioc check in bfq_get_rq_privateChristoph Hellwig
icq_to_bic is a container_of operation, so we need to check for NULL before it. Also move the check outside the spinlock while we're at it. Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-06-18blk-mq-sched: unify request finished methodsChristoph Hellwig
No need to have two different callouts of bfq vs kyber. Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-06-08block, bfq: access and cache blkg data only when safePaolo Valente
In blk-cgroup, operations on blkg objects are protected with the request_queue lock. This is no more the lock that protects I/O-scheduler operations in blk-mq. In fact, the latter are now protected with a finer-grained per-scheduler-instance lock. As a consequence, although blkg lookups are also rcu-protected, blk-mq I/O schedulers may see inconsistent data when they access blkg and blkg-related objects. BFQ does access these objects, and does incur this problem, in the following case. The blkg_lookup performed in bfq_get_queue, being protected (only) through rcu, may happen to return the address of a copy of the original blkg. If this is the case, then the blkg_get performed in bfq_get_queue, to pin down the blkg, is useless: it does not prevent blk-cgroup code from destroying both the original blkg and all objects directly or indirectly referred by the copy of the blkg. BFQ accesses these objects, which typically causes a crash for NULL-pointer dereference of memory-protection violation. Some additional protection mechanism should be added to blk-cgroup to address this issue. In the meantime, this commit provides a quick temporary fix for BFQ: cache (when safe) blkg data that might disappear right after a blkg_lookup. In particular, this commit exploits the following facts to achieve its goal without introducing further locks. Destroy operations on a blkg invoke, as a first step, hooks of the scheduler associated with the blkg. And these hooks are executed with bfqd->lock held for BFQ. As a consequence, for any blkg associated with the request queue an instance of BFQ is attached to, we are guaranteed that such a blkg is not destroyed, and that all the pointers it contains are consistent, while that instance is holding its bfqd->lock. A blkg_lookup performed with bfqd->lock held then returns a fully consistent blkg, which remains consistent until this lock is held. In more detail, this holds even if the returned blkg is a copy of the original one. Finally, also the object describing a group inside BFQ needs to be protected from destruction on the blkg_free of the original blkg (which invokes bfq_pd_free). This commit adds private refcounting for this object, to let it disappear only after no bfq_queue refers to it any longer. This commit also removes or updates some stale comments on locking issues related to blk-cgroup operations. Reported-by: Tomas Konir <tomas.konir@gmail.com> Reported-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Reported-by: Marco Piazza <mpiazza@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by: Tomas Konir <tomas.konir@gmail.com> Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com> Tested-by: Marco Piazza <mpiazza@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-05-10block, bfq: stress that low_latency must be off to get max throughputPaolo Valente
The introduction of the BFQ and Kyber I/O schedulers has triggered a new wave of I/O benchmarks. Unfortunately, comments and discussions on these benchmarks confirm that there is still little awareness that it is very hard to achieve, at the same time, a low latency and a high throughput. In particular, virtually all benchmarks measure throughput, or throughput-related figures of merit, but, for BFQ, they use the scheduler in its default configuration. This configuration is geared, instead, toward a low latency. This is evidently a sign that BFQ documentation is still too unclear on this important aspect. This commit addresses this issue by stressing how BFQ configuration must be (easily) changed if the only goal is maximum throughput. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-20block, bfq: don't dereference bic before null checking itColin Ian King
The call to bfq_check_ioprio_change will dereference bic, however, the null check for bic is after this call. Move the the null check on bic to before the call to avoid any potential null pointer dereference issues. Detected by CoverityScan, CID#1430138 ("Dereference before null check") Signed-off-by: Colin Ian King <colin.king@canonical.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: split bfq-iosched.c into multiple source filesPaolo Valente
The BFQ I/O scheduler features an optimal fair-queuing (proportional-share) scheduling algorithm, enriched with several mechanisms to boost throughput and reduce latency for interactive and real-time applications. This makes BFQ a large and complex piece of code. This commit addresses this issue by splitting BFQ into three main, independent components, and by moving each component into a separate source file: 1. Main algorithm: handles the interaction with the kernel, and decides which requests to dispatch; it uses the following two further components to achieve its goals. 2. Scheduling engine (Hierarchical B-WF2Q+ scheduling algorithm): computes the schedule, using weights and budgets provided by the above component. 3. cgroups support: handles group operations (creation, destruction, move, ...). Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: remove all get and put of I/O contextsPaolo Valente
When a bfq queue is set in service and when it is merged, a reference to the I/O context associated with the queue is taken. This reference is then released when the queue is deselected from service or split. More precisely, the release of the reference is postponed to when the scheduler lock is released, to avoid nesting between the scheduler and the I/O-context lock. In fact, such nesting would lead to deadlocks, because of other code paths that take the same locks in the opposite order. This postponing of I/O-context releases does complicate code. This commit addresses these issue by modifying involved operations in such a way to not need to get the above I/O-context references any more. Then it also removes any get and release of these references. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: handle bursts of queue activationsArianna Avanzini
Many popular I/O-intensive services or applications spawn or reactivate many parallel threads/processes during short time intervals. Examples are systemd during boot or git grep. These services or applications benefit mostly from a high throughput: the quicker the I/O generated by their processes is cumulatively served, the sooner the target job of these services or applications gets completed. As a consequence, it is almost always counterproductive to weight-raise any of the queues associated to the processes of these services or applications: in most cases it would just lower the throughput, mainly because weight-raising also implies device idling. To address this issue, an I/O scheduler needs, first, to detect which queues are associated with these services or applications. In this respect, we have that, from the I/O-scheduler standpoint, these services or applications cause bursts of activations, i.e., activations of different queues occurring shortly after each other. However, a shorter burst of activations may be caused also by the start of an application that does not consist in a lot of parallel I/O-bound threads (see the comments on the function bfq_handle_burst for details). In view of these facts, this commit introduces: 1) an heuristic to detect (only) bursts of queue activations caused by services or applications consisting in many parallel I/O-bound threads; 2) the prevention of device idling and weight-raising for the queues belonging to these bursts. Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: boost the throughput with random I/O on NCQ-capable HDDsPaolo Valente
This patch is basically the counterpart, for NCQ-capable rotational devices, of the previous patch. Exactly as the previous patch does on flash-based devices and for any workload, this patch disables device idling on rotational devices, but only for random I/O. In fact, only with these queues disabling idling boosts the throughput on NCQ-capable rotational devices. To not break service guarantees, idling is disabled for NCQ-enabled rotational devices only when the same symmetry conditions considered in the previous patches hold. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: boost the throughput on NCQ-capable flash-based devicesPaolo Valente
This patch boosts the throughput on NCQ-capable flash-based devices, while still preserving latency guarantees for interactive and soft real-time applications. The throughput is boosted by just not idling the device when the in-service queue remains empty, even if the queue is sync and has a non-null idle window. This helps to keep the drive's internal queue full, which is necessary to achieve maximum performance. This solution to boost the throughput is a port of commits a68bbdd and f7d7b7a for CFQ. As already highlighted in a previous patch, allowing the device to prefetch and internally reorder requests trivially causes loss of control on the request service order, and hence on service guarantees. Fortunately, as discussed in detail in the comments on the function bfq_bfqq_may_idle(), if every process has to receive the same fraction of the throughput, then the service order enforced by the internal scheduler of a flash-based device is relatively close to that enforced by BFQ. In particular, it is close enough to let service guarantees be substantially preserved. Things change in an asymmetric scenario, i.e., if not every process has to receive the same fraction of the throughput. In this case, to guarantee the desired throughput distribution, the device must be prevented from prefetching requests. This is exactly what this patch does in asymmetric scenarios. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: reduce idling only in symmetric scenariosArianna Avanzini
A seeky queue (i..e, a queue containing random requests) is assigned a very small device-idling slice, for throughput issues. Unfortunately, given the process associated with a seeky queue, this behavior causes the following problem: if the process, say P, performs sync I/O and has a higher weight than some other processes doing I/O and associated with non-seeky queues, then BFQ may fail to guarantee to P its reserved share of the throughput. The reason is that idling is key for providing service guarantees to processes doing sync I/O [1]. This commit addresses this issue by allowing the device-idling slice to be reduced for a seeky queue only if the scenario happens to be symmetric, i.e., if all the queues are to receive the same share of the throughput. [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Riccardo Pizzetti <riccardo.pizzetti@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Samuele Zecchini <samuele.zecchini92@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: add Early Queue Merge (EQM)Arianna Avanzini
A set of processes may happen to perform interleaved reads, i.e., read requests whose union would give rise to a sequential read pattern. There are two typical cases: first, processes reading fixed-size chunks of data at a fixed distance from each other; second, processes reading variable-size chunks at variable distances. The latter case occurs for example with QEMU, which splits the I/O generated by a guest into multiple chunks, and lets these chunks be served by a pool of I/O threads, iteratively assigning the next chunk of I/O to the first available thread. CFQ denotes as 'cooperating' a set of processes that are doing interleaved I/O, and when it detects cooperating processes, it merges their queues to obtain a sequential I/O pattern from the union of their I/O requests, and hence boost the throughput. Unfortunately, in the following frequent case, the mechanism implemented in CFQ for detecting cooperating processes and merging their queues is not responsive enough to handle also the fluctuating I/O pattern of the second type of processes. Suppose that one process of the second type issues a request close to the next request to serve of another process of the same type. At that time the two processes would be considered as cooperating. But, if the request issued by the first process is to be merged with some other already-queued request, then, from the moment at which this request arrives, to the moment when CFQ controls whether the two processes are cooperating, the two processes are likely to be already doing I/O in distant zones of the disk surface or device memory. CFQ uses however preemption to get a sequential read pattern out of the read requests performed by the second type of processes too. As a consequence, CFQ uses two different mechanisms to achieve the same goal: boosting the throughput with interleaved I/O. This patch introduces Early Queue Merge (EQM), a unified mechanism to get a sequential read pattern with both types of processes. The main idea is to immediately check whether a newly-arrived request lets some pair of processes become cooperating, both in the case of actual request insertion and, to be responsive with the second type of processes, in the case of request merge. Both types of processes are then handled by just merging their queues. Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Mauro Andreolini <mauro.andreolini@unimore.it> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: reduce latency during request-pool saturationPaolo Valente
This patch introduces an heuristic that reduces latency when the I/O-request pool is saturated. This goal is achieved by disabling device idling, for non-weight-raised queues, when there are weight- raised queues with pending or in-flight requests. In fact, as explained in more detail in the comment on the function bfq_bfqq_may_idle(), this reduces the rate at which processes associated with non-weight-raised queues grab requests from the pool, thereby increasing the probability that processes associated with weight-raised queues get a request immediately (or at least soon) when they need one. Along the same line, if there are weight-raised queues, then this patch halves the service rate of async (write) requests for non-weight-raised queues. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: preserve a low latency also with NCQ-capable drivesPaolo Valente
I/O schedulers typically allow NCQ-capable drives to prefetch I/O requests, as NCQ boosts the throughput exactly by prefetching and internally reordering requests. Unfortunately, as discussed in detail and shown experimentally in [1], this may cause fairness and latency guarantees to be violated. The main problem is that the internal scheduler of an NCQ-capable drive may postpone the service of some unlucky (prefetched) requests as long as it deems serving other requests more appropriate to boost the throughput. This patch addresses this issue by not disabling device idling for weight-raised queues, even if the device supports NCQ. This allows BFQ to start serving a new queue, and therefore allows the drive to prefetch new requests, only after the idling timeout expires. At that time, all the outstanding requests of the expired queue have been most certainly served. [1] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: reduce I/O latency for soft real-time applicationsPaolo Valente
To guarantee a low latency also to the I/O requests issued by soft real-time applications, this patch introduces a further heuristic, which weight-raises (in the sense explained in the previous patch) also the queues associated to applications deemed as soft real-time. To be deemed as soft real-time, an application must meet two requirements. First, the application must not require an average bandwidth higher than the approximate bandwidth required to playback or record a compressed high-definition video. Second, the request pattern of the application must be isochronous, i.e., after issuing a request or a batch of requests, the application must stop issuing new requests until all its pending requests have been completed. After that, the application may issue a new batch, and so on. As for the second requirement, it is critical to require also that, after all the pending requests of the application have been completed, an adequate minimum amount of time elapses before the application starts issuing new requests. This prevents also greedy (i.e., I/O-bound) applications from being incorrectly deemed, occasionally, as soft real-time. In fact, if *any amount of time* is fine, then even a greedy application may, paradoxically, meet both the above requirements, if: (1) the application performs random I/O and/or the device is slow, and (2) the CPU load is high. The reason is the following. First, if condition (1) is true, then, during the service of the application, the throughput may be low enough to let the application meet the bandwidth requirement. Second, if condition (2) is true as well, then the application may occasionally behave in an apparently isochronous way, because it may simply stop issuing requests while the CPUs are busy serving other processes. To address this issue, the heuristic leverages the simple fact that greedy applications issue *all* their requests as quickly as they can, whereas soft real-time applications spend some time processing data after each batch of requests is completed. In particular, the heuristic works as follows. First, according to the above isochrony requirement, the heuristic checks whether an application may be soft real-time, thereby giving to the application the opportunity to be deemed as such, only when both the following two conditions happen to hold: 1) the queue associated with the application has expired and is empty, 2) there is no outstanding request of the application. Suppose that both conditions hold at time, say, t_c and that the application issues its next request at time, say, t_i. At time t_c the heuristic computes the next time instant, called soft_rt_next_start in the code, such that, only if t_i >= soft_rt_next_start, then both the next conditions will hold when the application issues its next request: 1) the application will meet the above bandwidth requirement, 2) a given minimum time interval, say Delta, will have elapsed from time t_c (so as to filter out greedy application). The current value of Delta is a little bit higher than the value that we have found, experimentally, to be adequate on a real, general-purpose machine. In particular we had to increase Delta to make the filter quite precise also in slower, embedded systems, and in KVM/QEMU virtual machines (details in the comments on the code). If the application actually issues its next request after time soft_rt_next_start, then its associated queue will be weight-raised for a relatively short time interval. If, during this time interval, the application proves again to meet the bandwidth and isochrony requirements, then the end of the weight-raising period for the queue is moved forward, and so on. Note that an application whose associated queue never happens to be empty when it expires will never have the opportunity to be deemed as soft real-time. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: improve responsivenessPaolo Valente
This patch introduces a simple heuristic to load applications quickly, and to perform the I/O requested by interactive applications just as quickly. To this purpose, both a newly-created queue and a queue associated with an interactive application (we explain in a moment how BFQ decides whether the associated application is interactive), receive the following two special treatments: 1) The weight of the queue is raised. 2) The queue unconditionally enjoys device idling when it empties; in fact, if the requests of a queue are sync, then performing device idling for the queue is a necessary condition to guarantee that the queue receives a fraction of the throughput proportional to its weight (see [1] for details). For brevity, we call just weight-raising the combination of these two preferential treatments. For a newly-created queue, weight-raising starts immediately and lasts for a time interval that: 1) depends on the device speed and type (rotational or non-rotational), and 2) is equal to the time needed to load (start up) a large-size application on that device, with cold caches and with no additional workload. Finally, as for guaranteeing a fast execution to interactive, I/O-related tasks (such as opening a file), consider that any interactive application blocks and waits for user input both after starting up and after executing some task. After a while, the user may trigger new operations, after which the application stops again, and so on. Accordingly, the low-latency heuristic weight-raises again a queue in case it becomes backlogged after being idle for a sufficiently long (configurable) time. The weight-raising then lasts for the same time as for a just-created queue. According to our experiments, the combination of this low-latency heuristic and of the improvements described in the previous patch allows BFQ to guarantee a high application responsiveness. [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: add more fairness with writes and slow processesPaolo Valente
This patch deals with two sources of unfairness, which can also cause high latencies and throughput loss. The first source is related to write requests. Write requests tend to starve read requests, basically because, on one side, writes are slower than reads, whereas, on the other side, storage devices confuse schedulers by deceptively signaling the completion of write requests immediately after receiving them. This patch addresses this issue by just throttling writes. In particular, after a write request is dispatched for a queue, the budget of the queue is decremented by the number of sectors to write, multiplied by an (over)charge coefficient. The value of the coefficient is the result of our tuning with different devices. The second source of unfairness has to do with slowness detection: when the in-service queue is expired, BFQ also controls whether the queue has been "too slow", i.e., has consumed its last-assigned budget at such a low rate that it would have been impossible to consume all of this budget within the maximum time slice T_max (Subsec. 3.5 in [1]). In this case, the queue is always (over)charged the whole budget, to reduce its utilization of the device. Both this overcharge and the slowness-detection criterion may cause unfairness. First, always charging a full budget to a slow queue is too coarse. It is much more accurate, and this patch lets BFQ do so, to charge an amount of service 'equivalent' to the amount of time during which the queue has been in service. As explained in more detail in the comments on the code, this enables BFQ to provide time fairness among slow queues. Secondly, because of ZBR, a queue may be deemed as slow when its associated process is performing I/O on the slowest zones of a disk. However, unless the process is truly too slow, not reducing the disk utilization of the queue is more profitable in terms of disk throughput than the opposite. A similar problem is caused by logical block mapping on non-rotational devices. For this reason, this patch lets a queue be charged time, and not budget, only if the queue has consumed less than 2/3 of its assigned budget. As an additional, important benefit, this tolerance allows BFQ to preserve enough elasticity to still perform bandwidth, and not time, distribution with little unlucky or quasi-sequential processes. Finally, for the same reasons as above, this patch makes slowness detection itself much less harsh: a queue is deemed slow only if it has consumed its budget at less than half of the peak rate. [1] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: modify the peak-rate estimatorPaolo Valente
Unless the maximum budget B_max that BFQ can assign to a queue is set explicitly by the user, BFQ automatically updates B_max. In particular, BFQ dynamically sets B_max to the number of sectors that can be read, at the current estimated peak rate, during the maximum time, T_max, allowed before a budget timeout occurs. In formulas, if we denote as R_est the estimated peak rate, then B_max = T_max ∗ R_est. Hence, the higher R_est is with respect to the actual device peak rate, the higher the probability that processes incur budget timeouts unjustly is. Besides, a too high value of B_max unnecessarily increases the deviation from an ideal, smooth service. Unfortunately, it is not trivial to estimate the peak rate correctly: because of the presence of sw and hw queues between the scheduler and the device components that finally serve I/O requests, it is hard to say exactly when a given dispatched request is served inside the device, and for how long. As a consequence, it is hard to know precisely at what rate a given set of requests is actually served by the device. On the opposite end, the dispatch time of any request is trivially available, and, from this piece of information, the "dispatch rate" of requests can be immediately computed. So, the idea in the next function is to use what is known, namely request dispatch times (plus, when useful, request completion times), to estimate what is unknown, namely in-device request service rate. The main issue is that, because of the above facts, the rate at which a certain set of requests is dispatched over a certain time interval can vary greatly with respect to the rate at which the same requests are then served. But, since the size of any intermediate queue is limited, and the service scheme is lossless (no request is silently dropped), the following obvious convergence property holds: the number of requests dispatched MUST become closer and closer to the number of requests completed as the observation interval grows. This is the key property used in this new version of the peak-rate estimator. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: improve throughput boostingPaolo Valente
The feedback-loop algorithm used by BFQ to compute queue (process) budgets is basically a set of three update rules, one for each of the main reasons why a queue may be expired. If many processes suddenly switch from sporadic I/O to greedy and sequential I/O, then these rules are quite slow to assign large budgets to these processes, and hence to achieve a high throughput. On the opposite side, BFQ assigns the maximum possible budget B_max to a just-created queue. This allows a high throughput to be achieved immediately if the associated process is I/O-bound and performs sequential I/O from the beginning. But it also increases the worst-case latency experienced by the first requests issued by the process, because the larger the budget of a queue waiting for service is, the later the queue will be served by B-WF2Q+ (Subsec 3.3 in [1]). This is detrimental for an interactive or soft real-time application. To tackle these throughput and latency problems, on one hand this patch changes the initial budget value to B_max/2. On the other hand, it re-tunes the three rules, adopting a more aggressive, multiplicative increase/linear decrease scheme. This scheme trades latency for throughput more than before, and tends to assign large budgets quickly to processes that are or become I/O-bound. For two of the expiration reasons, the new version of the rules also contains some more little improvements, briefly described below. *No more backlog.* In this case, the budget was larger than the number of sectors actually read/written by the process before it stopped doing I/O. Hence, to reduce latency for the possible future I/O requests of the process, the old rule simply set the next budget to the number of sectors actually consumed by the process. However, if there are still outstanding requests, then the process may have not yet issued its next request just because it is still waiting for the completion of some of the still outstanding ones. If this sub-case holds true, then the new rule, instead of decreasing the budget, doubles it, proactively, in the hope that: 1) a larger budget will fit the actual needs of the process, and 2) the process is sequential and hence a higher throughput will be achieved by serving the process longer after granting it access to the device. *Budget timeout*. The original rule set the new budget to the maximum value B_max, to maximize throughput and let all processes experiencing budget timeouts receive the same share of the device time. In our experiments we verified that this sudden jump to B_max did not provide sensible benefits; rather it increased the latency of processes performing sporadic and short I/O. The new rule only doubles the budget. [1] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: add full hierarchical scheduling and cgroups supportArianna Avanzini
Add complete support for full hierarchical scheduling, with a cgroups interface. Full hierarchical scheduling is implemented through the 'entity' abstraction: both bfq_queues, i.e., the internal BFQ queues associated with processes, and groups are represented in general by entities. Given the bfq_queues associated with the processes belonging to a given group, the entities representing these queues are sons of the entity representing the group. At higher levels, if a group, say G, contains other groups, then the entity representing G is the parent entity of the entities representing the groups in G. Hierarchical scheduling is performed as follows: if the timestamps of a leaf entity (i.e., of a bfq_queue) change, and such a change lets the entity become the next-to-serve entity for its parent entity, then the timestamps of the parent entity are recomputed as a function of the budget of its new next-to-serve leaf entity. If the parent entity belongs, in its turn, to a group, and its new timestamps let it become the next-to-serve for its parent entity, then the timestamps of the latter parent entity are recomputed as well, and so on. When a new bfq_queue must be set in service, the reverse path is followed: the next-to-serve highest-level entity is chosen, then its next-to-serve child entity, and so on, until the next-to-serve leaf entity is reached, and the bfq_queue that this entity represents is set in service. Writeback is accounted for on a per-group basis, i.e., for each group, the async I/O requests of the processes of the group are enqueued in a distinct bfq_queue, and the entity associated with this queue is a child of the entity associated with the group. Weights can be assigned explicitly to groups and processes through the cgroups interface, differently from what happens, for single processes, if the cgroups interface is not used (as explained in the description of the previous patch). In particular, since each node has a full scheduler, each group can be assigned its own weight. Signed-off-by: Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19block, bfq: introduce the BFQ-v0 I/O scheduler as an extra schedulerPaolo Valente
We tag as v0 the version of BFQ containing only BFQ's engine plus hierarchical support. BFQ's engine is introduced by this commit, while hierarchical support is added by next commit. We use the v0 tag to distinguish this minimal version of BFQ from the versions containing also the features and the improvements added by next commits. BFQ-v0 coincides with the version of BFQ submitted a few years ago [1], apart from the introduction of preemption, described below. BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, whose general structure, plus a lot of code, are borrowed from CFQ. - Each process doing I/O on a device is associated with a weight and a (bfq_)queue. - BFQ grants exclusive access to the device, for a while, to one queue (process) at a time, and implements this service model by associating every queue with a budget, measured in number of sectors. - After a queue is granted access to the device, the budget of the queue is decremented, on each request dispatch, by the size of the request. - The in-service queue is expired, i.e., its service is suspended, only if one of the following events occurs: 1) the queue finishes its budget, 2) the queue empties, 3) a "budget timeout" fires. - The budget timeout prevents processes doing random I/O from holding the device for too long and dramatically reducing throughput. - Actually, as in CFQ, a queue associated with a process issuing sync requests may not be expired immediately when it empties. In contrast, BFQ may idle the device for a short time interval, giving the process the chance to go on being served if it issues a new request in time. Device idling typically boosts the throughput on rotational devices, if processes do synchronous and sequential I/O. In addition, under BFQ, device idling is also instrumental in guaranteeing the desired throughput fraction to processes issuing sync requests (see [2] for details). - With respect to idling for service guarantees, if several processes are competing for the device at the same time, but all processes (and groups, after the following commit) have the same weight, then BFQ guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling the device. Throughput is thus as high as possible in this common scenario. - Queues are scheduled according to a variant of WF2Q+, named B-WF2Q+, and implemented using an augmented rb-tree to preserve an O(log N) overall complexity. See [2] for more details. B-WF2Q+ is also ready for hierarchical scheduling. However, for a cleaner logical breakdown, the code that enables and completes hierarchical support is provided in the next commit, which focuses exactly on this feature. - B-WF2Q+ guarantees a tight deviation with respect to an ideal, perfectly fair, and smooth service. In particular, B-WF2Q+ guarantees that each queue receives a fraction of the device throughput proportional to its weight, even if the throughput fluctuates, and regardless of: the device parameters, the current workload and the budgets assigned to the queue. - The last, budget-independence, property (although probably counterintuitive in the first place) is definitely beneficial, for the following reasons: - First, with any proportional-share scheduler, the maximum deviation with respect to an ideal service is proportional to the maximum budget (slice) assigned to queues. As a consequence, BFQ can keep this deviation tight not only because of the accurate service of B-WF2Q+, but also because BFQ *does not* need to assign a larger budget to a queue to let the queue receive a higher fraction of the device throughput. - Second, BFQ is free to choose, for every process (queue), the budget that best fits the needs of the process, or best leverages the I/O pattern of the process. In particular, BFQ updates queue budgets with a simple feedback-loop algorithm that allows a high throughput to be achieved, while still providing tight latency guarantees to time-sensitive applications. When the in-service queue expires, this algorithm computes the next budget of the queue so as to: - Let large budgets be eventually assigned to the queues associated with I/O-bound applications performing sequential I/O: in fact, the longer these applications are served once got access to the device, the higher the throughput is. - Let small budgets be eventually assigned to the queues associated with time-sensitive applications (which typically perform sporadic and short I/O), because, the smaller the budget assigned to a queue waiting for service is, the sooner B-WF2Q+ will serve that queue (Subsec 3.3 in [2]). - Weights can be assigned to processes only indirectly, through I/O priorities, and according to the relation: weight = 10 * (IOPRIO_BE_NR - ioprio). The next patch provides, instead, a cgroups interface through which weights can be assigned explicitly. - If several processes are competing for the device at the same time, but all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling the device. It uses preemption instead. Throughput is then much higher in this common scenario. - ioprio classes are served in strict priority order, i.e., lower-priority queues are not served as long as there are higher-priority queues. Among queues in the same class, the bandwidth is distributed in proportion to the weight of each queue. A very thin extra bandwidth is however guaranteed to the Idle class, to prevent it from starving. - If the strict_guarantees parameter is set (default: unset), then BFQ - always performs idling when the in-service queue becomes empty; - forces the device to serve one I/O request at a time, by dispatching a new request only if there is no outstanding request. In the presence of differentiated weights or I/O-request sizes, both the above conditions are needed to guarantee that every queue receives its allotted share of the bandwidth (see Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt for more details). Setting strict_guarantees may evidently affect throughput. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/1/234 https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/11/148 [2] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>